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March 31, 2005

The path to greatness leaves many skeletons compacted into the trodden earth, but in this case they’re just websites I made over the years. Culled from my old hard drives and web archives, they survive in piecemeal form. If you want to peer into my psyche, this is probably the wrong place; but if you like retro web design (ya know, before css), you’re good to go. Here they are, in roughly chronological order:

Marathon
This is one of my earliest sites, a simple webpage to host the maps I made for the Bungie game Marathon. I actually think the design holds up pretty well, it has that vibrant 90′s style neon thing going on. And speaking of Marathon…

Bungie Sellout
When Bungie was bought up by Microsoft, the Mac gaming-geek crowd cried “sellouts!” Bungie swore they were dedicated to the Mac, nothing would change, etc. Well, yeah, right. Anyway, this site was popular for 34.6 minutes, the contributions were great. Having been created before the days of blog software, it was all done by hand. The design is ok, I kept it similar to my Marathon page for consistency.

VÃ¤porOS
Ah, the big one. VÃ¤porOS was my most popular website, having pulled in lots of international email, web press, magazine converage and Presidential honors (ok, maybe not).

I created it back in the internet dark ages, say about 1996, primarily as a way to flex my html coding skills. The site was a parody of the many grass-roots “free os” movements popping up at the time, which where frustrated with the progression of Apple’s then next-great operating system, code-named Copland.

The design is nothing spectacular, but again, being before the days of blog software, tying many pages together with a common template was tricky, manual work. I think the writing holds up rather well. There’s actually an underlying narrative sprinkled throughout the site if you bother to read every word, but then that was mostly for my own satisfaction. A bit more on VÃ¤porOS at re:DalahÃ¼s.

For some reason Swedes in particular thought it was a real company.

Macarazzi
VÃ¤porOS was a fun ride, but eventually went into the terminal “maintenance mode”. Looking for a new creative outlet, I came up with Macarazzi taking advantage of the best aspect of VÃ¤porOS, the fake news. The idea here was a parody of Mac rumor sites, the design being a riff on the always entertaining Mac OS Rumors (I won’t url them, they don’t deserve the hits). I took real news stories of the day and put a satirical spin on them, in a style one might now call “Onion-esque”. It didn’t last very long, but a few people liked it. If you want to see a good current version of Macarazzi, check out Crazy Apple Rumors.